Myths About Afghanistan
Victor Davis Hanson on whether Afghanistan is really the "graveyard of empires ..."
Victor Davis Hanson on whether Afghanistan is really the "graveyard of empires ..."
Ernie Pyle's timeless wartime columns ...
No July 4 hot dogs with the Iranian Mullahs ...
Mark Steyn, U.S. sclerotic and ineffectual, declining into societal dementia ...
Nicholas Schmidle asks some hard questions about Nawaz Sharif ...
The CIA's war against President Bush was motivated by ass covering, or by political
NSA Director Keith Alexander, a three-star general, is expected to earn a fourth star when he
NSA Director Keith Alexander, a three-star general, is expected to earn a fourth star when he
Providing electronic devices for IEDs ...
Police watched from a distance and did not intervene ...
Been there, done that in the Middle East ...
Matt Sanchez - repealing DADT would be a disaster.
Too much U.S. largesse has created corruption in Afghan government.
Dan Riehl weighs in on language, thinking and security from terrorism ...
The U.S. is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tonnes of arms to Israel
Sharif brothers on Baitullah Mehsud's hit list.
No Georgian destruction of Tskhinvali, contrary to lying Russian claims.
Nuclear yield within six to twelve months.
McNeill ties length to Pakistan tribal region, likely to be protracted anyway.
Multinational force press release on Sadr City operations and seizure of weapons and munitions.
"We will fight them to the end."
War on terror not popular with Pakistani population.
U.S. presence expanding Southward in Iraq.
Its full steam ahead for Iran.
And SECDEF Gates continues to press this issue.
Pajamas Media exclusive: how your tax dollars fund terror.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Graduate executed in Afghanistan.
Nearly 1000 dead from harshest Afghan winter in 30 years.
Attacks in Baghdad down 80% according to Iraqi Army.
Lack of appropriate defense spending a grave situation.
Olmert claims Iran still on target to construct nuclear weapon.
Promoted to Army Vice Chief of Staff. Well deserved.
Must read on Israeli Army shame and lawyer happiness with war against Hezbollah.
Libyans joining jihad in increasing numbers.
How relevant will Maliki be to Iraq's future?
Maj. Gen. Gaskin: "The positive trends are permanent."
Abizaid questions whether Maliki can bring unity to Iraq.
From the Multinational Force, more on Operation Lion Pounce.
An important ally in Iraq has been assassinated.
Israel to show Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff nuclear intelligence on Iran.
Cabinet approves proposed agreement with U.S.
Prof. Kingsley Browne on his new book.
Major General Robert Scales: "Outcome is irreversible"
Mullen says military needs larger slice of GNP to modernize.
For siding with the U.S. against al Qaeda.
Terrorist poses as bride. Ugh!
Legislation in trouble.
Al Qaeda documents discovered near Syrian border.
Shameful people jeer disabled veterans in swimming pool.
Saudi jihadist in Iraq tells his personal story.
Concerning Iranian meddling and Quds.
Michael Yon breaks bread with General Petraeus.
Ralph Peters on the advancements in Iraq.
War between al Qaeda and Hezbollah.
Traumatic brain injury not recognized.
Ballistic Sensor Fused Munition.
High intensity electronic warfare.
Iranian weapons are a sign of continued Iranian meddling in Iraq.
U.S. forces in Iraq are using a high-resolution, thermal/infrared sensor system.
Washington Post profiles AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq, or al Qaeda in Mesopotamia).
Taiwan may not be as secure as we would like to think.
Be thankful your daughter isn't be raised in Basra.
Pastor discusses rules of engagement and sacrificial U.S. deaths.
In counterinsurgency (COIN), patience is a virtue. But violence has decreased so fast in
“So I can hear it now – the First Sergeant says, ‘Okay. Instead of practicing room clearing exercises, today and tomorrow we have a work party at the armory to remove certain inscriptions on your ACOGs.’ Rather than training to do your job and save your life, you spend your time making somebody happy who has nothing to do with any of this. The dude who is worried about this needs to find something else to do with his life” - A certain Marine
“I foresee ACLU involvement.
I also can foresee the Troops being told to remove the offending ‘codes’ and several filing through the outer casing of their sights causing a subsequent blanket order to cease filing and directing Cdrs to turn all the sights in to DS Maintenance for removal of the offending characters IAW MWO 9-236-10 followed by a GAO audit to determine how much the whole drill cost.
Oh. And the media report of J Troop, 10-73d Cav taking excess casualties due to the lack of optical sights, all having been in Maintenance for over three months, in the big fire fight at Fetterman’s Sangar…
All for something that doesn’t approach, much less pass the ’so what’ test” – Ken White, Small Wars Council
So by now you are all aware of the Biblical inscriptions on ACOGs sights sold by Trijicon to the U.S. Marines and Army. Without rehearing the details, the owner of the company who makes the ACOGs sights for the U.S. Marines is a Christian, and he has found a unique way to take pride in his work. He has tooled his factories to inscribe certain Biblical passages on the ACOGs sights.
General Petraeus is disturbed over the inscriptions. The U.S. Marine Corps is concerned, and Trijicon has agreed to remove them. Even the washed up, burned out, pacifist hippies at Creative Loafing have weighed in with indignation over the inscriptions (and Muslims with faux outrage after this was hyped in the American media). The Huffington Post has their usual knee jerk reaction. Kits have been distributed to remove the inscriptions from those sights which are currently in service (even though, rather surprisingly, the British Ministry of Defence has refused this remedy because it will remove weapons from the field where they are needed). They’ve taken a pass.
Now, I would never have included the inscriptions on the sights, but not because I disagree with the inscriptions. In general, I’m a boring kind of guy and just not creative enough to have come up with the idea. With General Petraeus, I am “disturbed” about a great many things: that we initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom with fewer troops than necessary to maintain the peace once the regime fell – that we have too few troops now in Afghanistan – that we may be losing our conventional capabilities as we necessarily focus on irregular warfare – that our warriors need an entirely new generation of weapons that won’t be funded – and so on the list could go. But “disturbed” over these inscriptions? Not even nearly. Generals should worry over things that warrant worry, such as micromanaging the campaign.
As for Trijicon, they have behaved admirably throughout this silly ordeal. If it had been me, I would have let the Marine Corps explain to parents and spouses of Marines why they rejected the best optical sights on the planet because someone who wasn’t involved in this objected to my world view. I would have responded, ‘Oh, go blow it out your …..,” well, never mind, that wouldn’t be very Christian.
From the Weekly Standard:
While we should be thankful that various individuals at Fort Hood acted in a “prompt and courageous” manner thereby preventing “greater losses,” it should never have gotten to that point. The Defense Department’s system is not working if it is left to first responders to stop a terrorist. A traitor within the military’s ranks, with compromised loyalties that had been known about for years—as was the case with Hasan—should be stopped before his finger is on the trigger.
Therein lies the central problem with the Pentagon’s report. It says nothing of consequence about Hasan or how to stop individuals like him in the future. Hasan is not even named in the report, but instead referred to as the “alleged perpetrator.” The report’s authors contend that the sanctity of the criminal investigation into the shooting needs to be upheld. But this is not an excuse for failing to name the attacker. The whole world knows that Major Nidal Malik Hasan did it.
Nor is the ongoing criminal investigation a valid reason for avoiding a serious discussion of Hasan’s ideological disposition. The report’s authors instead go to lengths to whitewash Hasan’s beliefs.
The report lumps all sorts of deviant and problematic behaviors together as if they have the same relevance to the events of November 5. Thus, we find a discussion of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual violence, elder abuse, and the disgusting methods employed by child molesters. We also learn of the deleterious effects of events “such as divorce, loss of a job, or death of a loved one,” all of which “may trigger suicide in those who are already vulnerable.”
Was Major Nidal Malik Hasan a child molester, a drug addict, or suicidal because of a recent divorce? No. So what does any of this have to do with the attack at Fort Hood? Absolutely nothing.
What is relevant is Hasan’s religious and political beliefs. He is a jihadist, although you would never know it by reading the Pentagon’s report. Instead in the report’s “literature review of risk factors for violence,” one comes across this sentence:
Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor; most fundamentalist groups are not violent, and religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.
This is a true statement; it is also completely meaningless in respect to the Fort Hood massacre. The brand of religious fundamentalism practiced by Hasan is specifically devoted to violence.
This article by Thomas Joscelyn rehearses some of the things we discussed in Radicalized Christian Terrorism. On a complex topic it’s easy to misunderstand truncated prose. This is the kind of topic that is better carried out as a series of conversations.
A number of readers / commenters conflated boundary conditions. This comment comes to us from Aristekrat:
I think it would certainly be fair to name any abortion bombing or killing as Christian terrorism. Admittedly, that is not near the problem that exists in Islam, but I disagree that is because Christianity is inherently peaceful and Islam is violent. At one time Christianity was not at all peaceful; surprisingly no one has mentioned the reformation and the wars of religion that lasted an extraordinarily long time, tore Europe apart, and were monstrously violent. That violence ultimately exhausted Europe and led to the Peace of Westphalia, the first harbinger of secularism. As secularism (and nationalism) ascended so religious violence in Europe dropped. Are you comfortable with the idea that the greater prevalence of religious violence in Islam might not be due to Islam being a more violent religion but because western civilization has embraced the (now) leftist doctrine of secularism and Islamic countries have not?
This is a very far reaching and broad comment and we will have to deal with aspects of it in later conversations. Suffice it to say that the proposition that secularism is related to a reduction in violence is incorrect from my vantage point, and the author of the comment is advised to study the following two texts:
Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
Douglas F. Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th Through 18th Centuries
Any conversation on this that begins without these two texts as a backdrop is a waste of time. So moving back to the issue of “any abortion bombing or killing as Christian terrorism,” this is once again a conflation of issues, a confusion of boundary conditions for my thought experiment.
We absolutely must get definitions and boundaries right for the conversation to have a common language. Without rehearsing the boundaries I laid down in the original article, let’s approach this from a different perspective, i.e., the perspective of Islamic terrorism.
A quick survey of my articles on Iraq and counterinsurgency shows without equivocation that I did not believe during the height of the insurgency, and do not believe now, that all insurgents in Iraq fought for religious motivation. In fact, most of them didn’t. To be sure, the several hundred per month who crossed the Syrian border coming from Somalia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other locales, included many who did fight predominately for religious motivation. But the indigenous insurgency primarily did not.
During Operation Alljah loud speakers were used by U.S. forces to address the public at Mosques, and even though this is a religious gathering, per se, I do not include this as religious-based insurgency or counterinsurgency. The Mosques were targeted as being the center of public activity and philosophy.
Again, a survey of my posts reminds the reader of just how involved we have been in attempting to understand how to separate an indigenous insurgency – who fights for many reasons, including money, youthful exuberance, boredom, etc. – from the religiously- based leadership.
Not all shootings in Iraq were a result of jihad. Nor have I categorized religious-on-religious violence (e.g., Shi’a on Sunni and vice versa) within the rubric of jihad or religiously-based violence. My definitions were very specific, and included the notion that one believes that his specific religious views warranted propagation via violence or subjugation of unbelievers.
Wars of power, convenience, tribe, family, wealth-seeking, and so on, do not qualify under this rubric. As for Islam, I have dealt with the competing hermeneutics within the Muslim world before by addressing stolid comments by Professor Steve Metz of the U.S. Army War College. Feel free to go study them in some detail.
I am left in this thought experiment without any compelling evidence whatsoever that anyone can come up with a single example of Christian terrorism that meets my definition – a definition, by the way, that I have consistently applied to Islamic terrorism as well.
You may disagree, you may respond with fury and fist. But what you cannot do is charge me with inconsistency. I have treated both Islam and Christianity with the same standards. In the mean time, I continue to be amused at the felt-need to legitimize moral-equivalency arguments, and even if you can find an example of Christian inspired terrorism, I have made you search hard. The search is hard because Christian Biblical hermeneutics doesn’t support terrorism.
The report on Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings has been released, and without rehearsing the pitiful whitewash that it was, one comment by intellectual lightweight Togo West bears a little unpacking.
Mr. West, at a second Pentagon news conference with Admiral Clark, said the problem with “self-radicalization” in the military was not rooted in Islam. “Suppose it were fundamentalist-Christian-inspired,” Mr. West said. “Our concern is not with the religion. It is with the potential effect on our soldiers’ ability to do their job.”
Hmmm. Not rooted in Islam. “Fundamentalist-Christian-inspired” terrorism. So. Let’s have a test question after we set some boundary conditions. First, let’s loosely define Christian as anyone who believes in the Trinitarian formula outlined in the Council Of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon (and perhaps also who holds to basic Christian soteriology as taught in the historical confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, Canons of Dort, Heidelberg Catechism, or for my Roman Catholic readers, the Council of Trent).
Next, let’s define religiously inspired terrorism as the belief that God has commanded that one’s faith must be promulgated by violence. Now that these basic stipulations have been made our house is in order for the test question. Can anyone name an instance of “fundamentalist-Christian-inspired” terrorism? Anyone? Even a single instance?
For the more stolid readers, leave the Crusades out of this. They were primarily a defensive operation as a result of Muslim aggression. Besides, give me something in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, please. And please don’t chime in with Timothy McVeigh. In his last interview the day before his execution, he made sure everyone knew that he was an atheist.
We can begin. Now that the test question has been posed, are there any takers? Give me one instance of Christian-inspired terrorism. Just one. Maybe intellectual lightweight Togo West can give me his data. I’m waiting.
It’s a wonderful thing to give thanks to those around you for their blessings upon you. Family, friends and coworkers rarely get enough thanks from you – and vice versa. But in the end, Thanksgiving is not really about thanking those around us. It’s one of the truly unique Christian holidays, unencumbered by tainted and confused history.
Thanksgiving, as conceived by the settlers to the new world, was about thanking God for His kind providence. Contrary to the idiotic Wikipedia entry, it is not now and will never be a secular holiday. One cannot truly know thankfulness without knowing the creator of the universe personally. So watch your football, eat until you are sick, and thank those around you. But this is only a shadow of its intent and purpose.
As a Christian and thoroughgoing Calvinist I have no problem knowing that our lives and times are in God’s hands, and I give Him thanks for all of His lovingkindness and blessings. I wish you well on this Thanksgiving and hope that you and yours not only give thanks to our creator, but know him personally. Leave aside rumblings of war, and focus on something else for a few days.
God has not made any normative promises to keep everyone safe in war, any more than He has given normative promises that no one will lose their jobs in a bad economy. He has given us a firm and fixed promise that He will be with His people no matter what they go through.
Religious symbols don’t convey some sort of magical powers, and thus the symbols taken into war by this Marine is more a statement of who he is and what he stands for than it is of anything else. It’s a statement of his religious belief and character. His gun makes him feel safe.
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